Fast Company

From zero to $1.65 billion in the blink of an eye, Nate Penn has the inside story on YouTube, the revolutionary Web site your friends won't stop sending you links to. PLUS: Links to OK Go's "A Million Ways," "MySpace: The Movie," and other viral videos

Holy shit, was that fast. It was just a little more than a year and a half ago that Steve Chen and Chad Hurley created YouTube so they could share videos more easily with their friends. (The first video hosted on the site was of Chen’s cat, Pajamas, clawing at a string.) Now, thanks to Google’s recent purchase of their creation for $1.65 billion, Chen and Hurley can spend the rest of their days taking oyster-and-Cristal baths, and YouTube is—well, depending on whom you talk to, it’s a lot of things: a visionary business concept that will revolutionize entertainment, the world’s largest forum for unmediated individual expression, or the hugest copyright infringer in the history of mankind. To compile the following time line of YouTube’s journey from Pajamas to world domination, GQ spoke with more than twenty-five people, including Chen and Hurley (who, perhaps in anticipation of the deal that had yet to go down, couldn’t have been more tight-lipped), as well as those who think the pair are thieves, those who are dying to do business with them, and those who are using the site in ways its creators never imagined and the corporate media can’t wholly grasp.

October 20, 2005

YouTube cracks Nielsen’s monthly Internet ratings for the first time, thanks to the posting, by Nike, of the site’s first breakout viral video, "Ronaldinho: Touch of Gold." In the clip, the Brazilian soccer star stands sixty feet from the goal and kicks a ball off the crossbar four consecutive times without letting it touch the ground. It’s a preposterous feat that fans attribute to computer trickery. Stefan Olander, director of global digital media, Nike: "It’s important to remember that YouTube didn’t have the reach and the presence it has today. It was just starting, and therefore we found it an important channel to try out." As for whether the feat in the video is real, he says, "Everyone agrees on one thing: If there’s one person who could do it, it would be Ronaldinho." A month later, Silicon Valley’s leading venture-capital firm, Sequoia, invests $3.5 million in the company. Roelof Botha, partner, Sequoia Capital, speaking from beneath a pile of money: "When we had our first meeting [about YouTube], the partners just said, ’This is so obvious. We have to make this investment.’ " On December 15, YouTube officially launches.

December 17, 2005

"Lazy Sunday," the music video featuring Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg rapping about cupcakes and chronic, airs on Saturday Night Live. Within hours, the video appears on YouTube. Observing a huge spike in viewership, Hurley asks NBC if the network itself has uploaded the clip. NBC says they don’t know; they’ll get back to him. Andy Samberg: "Those first few days, we were all walking around with our jaws dropped. Everyone we knew kept e-mailing us and calling us. It was a huge turning point in our careers. I’d maybe done two interviews before that, and almost every interview I’ve done since has been because of it. Only die-hard people used to recognize me—’Hey, you’re the new guy!’ Now I walk down the street and someone will just yell ’Lazy Sunday’! at me."

December 20, 2005

A strange, ethereal video called "guitar" appears on the site. It shows a kid who goes by the screen name "funtwo" bent over his guitar, his face concealed by a beige baseball cap. Without once looking up, he performs a sweep-picking tour de force—an intricate rock-guitar arrangement of Pachelbel’s Canon. YouTubers’ heads explode. "This kid is destined to be one of the great guitarists of all time," reads one of nearly 20,000 posted comments. The video accumulates 9.4 million views, but funtwo’s identity remains a mystery.

Early February 2006

After a month and a half and an estimated 6 million views, NBC figures out that the many copies of "Lazy Sunday" on YouTube are unauthorized and asks the company to pull them. The move has a certain because-we-can quality to it: On the one hand, the footage is NBC’s property; on the other, as The New York Times points out, the clip has revived interest in SNL "at a time when it is in need of some buzz." Samberg: "I come from the school of just making stuff and getting it out there. If I had an infinite amount of money and I was running NBC and it didn’t matter to me—which it wouldn’t, because I would have an infinite amount of money—I would just let it fly." NBC CEO Jeff Zucker, who must think making stuff and getting it out there is for suckers: "I don’t think it’s ever a mistake to protect our assets. I think ’Lazy Sunday’ did more for YouTube than YouTube did for ’Lazy Sunday.’ "

February 4, 2006

"MySpace: The Movie," a short film by 21-year-old David Lehre of Washington, Michigan (pop. 19,080), appears on YouTube. The film satirizes the lame behavior of MySpace users, and shortly after Lehre posts the movie on his Web site, someone else uploads it to YouTube. David Lehre: "I got half a million views overnight. Every day for a week, I got a hundred phone calls and enough e-mails to max out my inbox. The manager I signed with flew me out to L.A. and put me up in a swanky hotel. I took seven meetings a day with every studio, from every different medium. I made a deal with Fox to do a late-night comedy/variety show. I’m so far away from California, I couldn’t knock on doors. All I wanted in life was to be a successful person in the entertainment industry. I knew that if I made ’MySpace: The Movie,’ 90 million users would want to watch it. This wasn’t like a love letter to MySpace; it was a marketing move."

February 23, 2006

Chicago pop quartet OK Go post a homemade video (cost: $5) of band members practicing a choreographed dance to its song "A Million Ways."Lead singer Damian Kulash: "We wanted to have a ridiculous routine to do onstage so we could drop our instruments and break into dance. It seems sort of self-evident that that’s just an awesome thing to do." The clip ignites a Web copycat phenomenon. Eventually, due to the video’s insane popularity, the band is invited to perform at the Video Music Awards. Kulash: "It really is a watershed moment to watch MTV taking its cues from the people. At this point, most kids, if you tell them to check out a video, they’re not gonna turn on MTV and wait for six hours. They’re just gonna go to YouTube."

April 5, 2006

The company receives an additional $8 million in venture capital.

April 29, 2006

Minutes after Stephen Colbert delivers his remarks at the White House Correspondents Dinner, the footage, which aired on C-SPAN, is uploaded to YouTube. It draws 2.7 million views in less than forty-eight hours, and Colbert becomes something of a messianic figure to lefty bloggers. Four days later, C-SPAN asks YouTube to pull all its copies of the clip. Steve Chen: "That was like the shining moment in C-SPAN’s history. They had a breakout hit. But they asked us to remove it."

May 29, 2006

"Who We Are," a muckraking ad attacking the Bush administration, appears on YouTube; its creator is 15-year-old Ava Lowery: "I made it for the Daily Kos bloggers’ convention in Las Vegas. It starts out saying that the Bush administration has tried to paint its opponents as un-American, but that in reality we are patriots. It shows photos of people protesting: soldiers and regular Americans and Gold Star Families. Then it shows photos of different blogs and says these are the motivators of what we are doing. It’s scored to a Fatboy Slim remix of ’We Will Rock You.’ I received a couple of hundred death threats. There was one where somebody said they wanted to rape my corpse." Lowery is subsequently tapped to create a campaign commercial for antiwar Rhode Island senatorial candidate Carl Sheeler. Lowery: "Most of the Democrats in Congress are scared to speak up. What’s the point of having Democrats at all if they aren’t gonna challenge the Republicans? YouTube has brought political issues to younger voters; it’s a way to get to that audience."

Daily Variety announces that Brooke Brodack—a 20-year-old restaurant hostess from western Massachusetts who’s been posting goofily chaotic videos on the site since September—has signed a development deal with Carson Daly Productions. Brooke Brodack: "They told me that Carson had found my video. I didn’t know celebrities had any time to do anything, let alone go on YouTube and watch some girl bounce around her bedroom singing the Numa song." Harvey Weinstein, cochairman, the Weinstein Company: "I don’t think YouTube will replace TV anytime soon. But it’s introducing us to a whole new set of voices." Brodack: "I was really scared I wasn’t going to go anywhere with my life. But I want to try my hardest to change the face of TV. Television is a fairly serious business. It’s not like YouTube, where anyone can put anything on it; only big business can. I have this feeling I’m gonna do something really huge and different soon, and I don’t know what it is, and that’s got me really excited."

June 16, 2006

YouTube’s most compelling video blogger, Lonelygirl15, a.k.a. Bree, makes her first appearance on the site. She’s a geek’s fantasy come to life—a smoking-hot, clever, homeschooled girl who idolizes the late physicist Richard Feynman—and within three weeks her blogs are pulling in half a million views. But their professional-quality production values, along with Bree’s refusal to divulge any personal info, make many YouTubers suspicious. She’s too charming, too witty—she must be reading from a script. Others believe Bree is legit. Lonelygirl’s blogs are picked over like the Zapruder film for clues; at one point, fans claim they’ve gured out where she lives, because a certain wild plant seen in one episode grows only in a particular Northern California ecoclimate. The mystery—is she real or isn’t she?—becomes a national obsession. One popular theory: YouTube itself is producing the videos to promote the site. The company denies it.

July 12-16, 2006

Hurley attends the twenty-fourth annual Allen & Co. media-titan retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho. Google had waited ve years for its invite; but Hurley gets his after only eight months. Just prior to the retreat, fellow invitee Rupert Murdoch reportedly attempts to buy YouTube; Hurley turns him down, telling the Associated Press, "These guys want to work with us to stay relevant." Indeed, Hurley is "sucked up to by virtually every big-name ec in media," the New York Post says, and by the close of the retreat, he is "anointed the new-media demigod" by "Les Moonves, Barry Diller, Bob Iger, and other masters of the old-media universe."

July 14, 2006

Emmy Award-winning video journalist Robert Tur sues YouTube for copyright infringement. Tur says he’s protecting a news archive that has cost him upwards of $15 million to build; according to Tur, YouTube tells him he should sue its users and off&#xAC;ers him the information necessary to do so. The site’s position, he says, is that it’s an Internet service provider (ISP) and, as such, protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which stipulates that ISPs aren’t responsible for the activities of people who use their infrastructure to break the law. Robert Tur: "They’re clearly not an ISP. They’re not a company that connects people to the Internet itself. These are not visionaries. These are two thieves from Northern California."

August 3, 2006

After three years of fruitlessly warning his employers and the public about aws in a Homeland Security program, Michael De Kort, Lockheed’s lead engineer on the project, takes his case to YouTube. Michael De Kort: "I went to the CEO of Lockheed four times, to the board of directors. I went to the inspector general for Homeland Security. I wrote to every congressman and senator on the relevant committees. I went to the navy, to the NSA, to the commandant of the Coast Guard. I e-mailed every organization in the press." Finally, he hits on a brilliant publicity angle: From his spare bedroom in Monument, Colorado, De Kort reads a prepared statement into a Webcam, disclosing major problems with the retrofitting of a fleet of DHS patrol boats. Finally, The Washington Post runs the story. De Kort: "And then it went nuts. For two or three days straight, I’m doing interviews. ABC came to my house. Every major network called me. Except Fox."

August 27, 2006

After two impostors separately take credit for his performance (including a 12-year-old prodigy who plays the Canon in a concert at the Indonesian Embassy), guitar god "funtwo" is tracked down by The New York Times. He’s Jeong-Hyun Lim, a 23-year-old student from Seoul. Why did he keep his face hidden in his video? "I want the others to focus on my fingering and sound," he tells the paper. "Furthermore I know I’m not that handsome."

September 12, 2006

After some 16 million views, Web sleuths identify "Bree" as an actress named Jessica Rose; the next day, the creative team behind the video blogs comes clean in the L.A. Times. Jessica Rose: "I started to get nervous. I would read the forums, and I could tell that people were getting quite close. I went to Santa Monica one day, and I forgot my sunglasses, and that day we got a message from a girl there who said she thought she’d seen me in Borders books." Writer Mesh Flinders: "We passed out nondisclosure agreements like popcorn. I actually asked my parents to sign at one point, because I heard my mom had told my aunt." Director Miles Beckett: "We believe we’ve created a new form of entertainment—interactive storytelling. A fan can say something in the forums on Monday and have it get into the video that’s posted on Wednesday." Flinders: "The Internet right now is like radio circa The War of the Worlds. Radio was initially used for communication before people realized you could use it to tell stories, too. CAA now represents us, and they’re helping us navigate the traditional media system." Rose: "YouTube fame is not as intense as TV or movie fame. If I’m at a party and people have had a drink or two, they might say, ’Hey, aren’t you that girl on the Internet?’ But I’ve been able to get auditions and meetings with casting directors that I wouldn’t have been able to get previously."

September 13, 2006

Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group, the world’s leading record label, tells investors that YouTube and MySpace "are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars." Venture capitalist Fred Wilson: "YouTube has an audience of 20 million people who have shown that they want to get their video content from YouTube. For content owners to even think about trying to put that channel out of business is crazy. They should be trying to figure out how to make money putting their content in front of those 20 million people instead."

September 14, 2006

CBS chief ecutive Les Moonves rules out a purchase of YouTube. "The price [they’re demanding] is pretty phenomenal," he says. Later that month, tech billionaire Mark Cuban tells the AP only a "moron" would buy the site, because it’s going to be "sued into oblivion." Mark Cuban: "YouTube is like the bar that lets in underage kids. They’re packed until they get busted." Their main asset, he says, isn’t innovative technology or effective branding; it’s simply "traffic."

September 18, 2006

YouTube signs a licensing agreement with Warner Music Group. It’s the culmination of a courtship that dates from the 2005 Grammys. Warner CEO Lyor Cohen: "The company parked [Hurley and Chen] in a cabana outside the Beverly Hills Hotel with a huge spread of Nova lox and bagels, and our ecutives slid by talking to them." According to the terms of the deal, Warner will provide YouTube with thousands of its music videos and artist interviews and also share the advertising revenue from homemade videos that feature its music. Hurley and Chen had been seeking a template for big media deals; they may nally have it.

September 23, 2006

"All human life is here," the Daily Telegraph says of YouTube, and blogger Crusader reveals this to be so: YouTube, he observes, hosts Al Qaeda suicide-bomber-recruitment videos. Venture capitalist and ex-Napster CEO Hank Barry: "YouTube will become a repository, and the Internet will essentially become the new Library of Alexandria. It will be the place where most of the data about being a human being is stored."

September 27, 2006

UPI reports that "nding themselves on the popular YouTube.com Web site where embarrassing videos are posted has become a major fear for U.S. politicians." Among the examples cited is that of Senator George Allen (R-Va.), who lost a huge lead in his reelection campaign after footage was posted of him calling an Indian-American Democratic operative "macaca."

October 5-9, 2006

In anticipation of the rumored purchase of YouTube, Google’s market cap rises $5.3 billion. As one analyst tells GQ, "YouTube is worth nothing or it’s worth $3 billion. On the positive side is all the traffic they have and the deals they’ve made. On the negative side is the risk of further litigation."

October 9, 2006

Google purchases YouTube for $1.65 billion. The next day, Chen and Hurley post their own video on YouTube. Standing outside what looks to be a T.G.I. Friday’s, they thank the YouTube community, then dissolve into adolescent hilarity after Hurley asserts that the deal is the merging of "two kings." Worst. Video. Ever.

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